The West Hollywood Historic Preservation Commission approved the certificate of appropriateness for the Robertson Row project at its Oct. 12 meeting. A certificate of appropriateness is meant to protect historic buildings in the city from “inappropriate alteration.” The project will now move to the Planning Commission and City Council for approval as recommended by city staff.

The approximately three-acre Robertson Row project consists of eight land parcels located along Robertson Boulevard, North La Peer Drive and Santa Monica Boulevard at the border of West Hollywood’s Design District and Rainbow District. As currently proposed, the developer Faring plans to construct roughly 107,000 square feet of restaurants, retail, wellness spaces and gallery uses, together with outdoor dining and terrace spaces. The buildings would range from one to three stories. Each building is arranged along the site’s outer boundaries and would be connected through a series of walkways and courtyards. Plans also show two levels of underground parking.

The proposal includes a 98-foot-tall, three-sided billboard with two full-motion digital advertising sign faces built atop a one-story building planned for restaurant use. The billboard’s east and west outward faces would feature full-motion advertisements projecting out onto Santa Monica Boulevard. The billboard’s south side, which faces the project’s interior, would serve as a canopy for the food-and-beverage cafe planned below.

Under the city’s existing regulations, new offsite advertisements are not currently allowed along Santa Monica Boulevard. To build the billboard, the developer will need to change the project or seek an exemption from the City Council. At a Sept. 27 West Hollywood City Council candidate forum at the Beaches Tropicana, the top six fundraisers who were invited to speak at the forum, Councilwomen Chelsea Byers, Larry Block, Kyle Brazeal, Jonathan Cottrell, John Duran and Helen Krieger, said they would not support building large billboards on Santa Monica Boulevard.

Although they recommended approving the project, the Historic Preservation Society encouraged members of the public who objected to the property’s billboard presence to attend the Planning Commission meeting, since those concerns were outside its purview.

“The community is getting fatigued by billboards in general,” Historic Preservation Society Vice Chair Matthew Dubin said.

Over the past decade, the project site has undergone multiple iterations. Most recently, the project was known as the Robertson Lane Hotel Project, and the developer planned to build a hotel with 241 guest rooms. Planning developments associated with Robertson Lane expired in 2025 after several extensions.

One of the Robertson Row project’s four buildings is the Factory Building, which has cultural resource designation. Historically, the Factory Building housed a camera company, known as Mitchell Camera Corporation, a cosmetics warehouse and a popular disco club known as Studio One.

“Almost a decade ago, we heard the community when they asked us to save the factory,” Jake Stevens, Senior Vice President of Faring, said during the meeting, “Robertson Road does that and more, giving this incredible LGBTQ landmark an appropriate home and a transformative Robertson Road campus that links the Rainbow District and our city’s design district in the creative way that only WeHo can.”

In 2020, as part of the original Robertson Lane project, the Factory Building was cataloged, disassembled and placed into secure storage. The developer had plans to reassemble it under the Robertson Lane project.

Now, under the Robertson Row project, the developer plans to reconstruct the Factory Building and relocate it to the northernmost edge of the property along North Robertson Boulevard.

West Hollywood preservation advocate Victor Omelczenko wrote a public comment to the commission on Oct. 11, expressing concerns about the project.

“While I support the adaptive reuse and rehabilitation of the historic Mitchell Camera Factory / Studio One building, I strongly urge the commission to deny the certificate of appropriateness in its current form, or alternatively, require major modifications that remove the proposed 98-foot digital billboard and ensure the full, faithful restoration of the historic resource,” Omelczenko said.

Omelczenko’s main grievance with the project is the 98-foot-tall billboard, and he said its construction violates the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitating Historic Properties.

Standards 9 and 10 of the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation require that new construction be compatible in scale, massing, and proportion, and must not destroy the historic materials, features, and spatial relationships that characterize the property.

“Placing a 98-foot-tall, 3,300-square-foot, three-sided structural form featuring two full-motion digital advertising faces just 50 feet away from the historic Factory Building is a direct violation of these standards,” Omelczenko said. “It completely overwhelms the low-rise historic scale of the reconstructed 1929 Mitchell Camera building and degrades its historic setting.”

The project still needs additional approval before construction can begin, including from the Planning Commission and the City Council. When the city will further review the project has not yet been decided.